TALISH AND THE TALISHIS (THE STATE OF RESEARCH) GARNIK ASATRIAN, HABIB BORJIAN YerevanState University Introduction The land of Talish (T alis, Tales, Talysh, Tolysh) is located in the south-west of the Caspian Sea, and generally stretches from south-east to north for more than 150 km., consisting of the Talish range, sup- plemented by a narrow coastal strip with a fertile soil and high rainfall, with dozens of narrow valleys, discharging into the Caspian or into the Enzeli lagoon. This terrain shapes the historical habitat of Talishis who have lived a nomadic life, moving along the mountainous streams. Two factors, the terrain and the language set apart Talish from its neighbours. The densely vegetated mountainous Talish con- trasts the lowlands of Gilan in the east and the dry steppe lands of Mughan in Azarbaijan (Aturpatakan) in the west. The northern Talish in the current Azerbaijan Republic includes the regions of Lenkoran (Pers. Lankoran), Astara (Pers. Astara), Lerik, Masally, and Yardymly. Linguistically, the Talishis speak a North Western Iranian dialect, yet different from Gilaki, which belongs to the same group. Formerly, the whole territory inhabited by Talishis was part of the Iranian Empire. In 1813, Russia annexed its greater part in the north, which since has successively been ruled by the Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and since 1991 by the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. The southern half of Talish, south of the Astara river, occupies the eastern part of the Persian province of Gilan. As little is known about the Talishis in pre-modern times, it is diffi- cult to establish the origins of the people (cf. Bazin 1980, II: 67-70). The name Talis, like most ethnonyms, can not be convincingly settled (see below). It appears in early Arabic sources as al-Taylasan (Bala- dur, al-Tabari, Yaqutt, apud Barthold), and in Persian as Talisan, and Tavalis (Ilamd-Allah Qazvini, apud Dabir-siyaqi 2003: 102, 230), plu- ral forms of Talis. About the Taylasan, al-Tabari (V: 45) notes: "In the ? Brill,Leiden, 2005 Iran and the Caucasus,9.1 This content downloaded from 128.59.222.12 on Wed, 04 Nov 2015 19:15:29 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 44 GARNIK ASATRIAN, HABIB BORJIAN mountains surrounding A6arbaijan there used to live such peoples as the Gels and the al-Taylasan, who did not obey the Arabs and mastered their freedom and independence". However, the ethnonym Talis in its original form is first found in the 16th century Armenian version of the Alexander Romance (Marquart 1903: 278), originally translated from Greek in the 5th century: Ev patmeac'nma, t'eJp'axstakan e KKaspiakan druns, megjyas'xarhn T'alis, i gawarn Gilanay"And he related that he is a refugee from the Caspian gates, near the country of Talish, in the province of Gilan" (Simonyan 1989: 233; for details, see Asa- trian 1998: 7-8; cf. also Hubschmann 1897: 34).1 Talish has always been a land linked with either Gilan or Mughan, particularly with the centre of the latter, Ardabil, which seems to have had close ethnic and linguistic affinities with Talish until the Turkici- sation of Azarbaijan.2 This is evident as late as the early Safavids, the descendents of Shaikh Safi-al-din of Ardabil (d. 735/1334), whose mentor (morad) Shaikh Zahed Gilani, was probably a Talishi (cf. Ah- madi 2001: 17-18). Among the four Sufi teachers of Shah Isma'il, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, two had the epithet "Talishi", and other men with Talishi appellation appear among the names of the governmental officials during the Safavids and the successive dynas- ties. Due to the mountainous, peripheral nature of the district, how- ever, the process of the Shi'ite proselytism in Talish, enforced by the Safavids, remained incomplete. Thus, among the Talishi-speaking communities of Iran and Azerbaijan Republic we find a sizable num- ber of Sunnis. Save for the inhabitants of the central Talish, as well as the Turkic-speaking groups of the area, and the Gilakis, most of the Talishis in the Iranian part of Talish are Sunnis, followers of the Naqshbandiyya order. Their compatriots in the northern Talish, on the contrary, are mainly Shi'ites, except those living in some two dozen mountain villages. Following the fall of the empire of Nader Shah in the 17th century, the Talishis established a dynasty founded by a local noble named Sayyed Abbas. In 1785 this Talish khanate became a dependency of Fath 'Ali, the khan of Kuban, after whose death (1789) Talish re- gained its independence. It was only during the advance of Tsarist Russia through eastern Transcaucasia, when the Talishis made a tangible appearance in his- ' V. V. Bartol'd (1976: 273) notes that the name Talis has no attestations in Medieval sources. 2 Note the toponymic formant-bill-bd (< OIr. *waita-)in the place name Ardabl (see Bailey 1959: 116-1118),which can be tracedalso in Talish, cf. e.g. Lavandvil. This content downloaded from 128.59.222.12 on Wed, 04 Nov 2015 19:15:29 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TALISH AND THE TALISHIS 45 tory (see Mirza Ahmad Lankorani 2002; cf. also Hesam al-Saltaneh 1968). Peter the Great occupied the region for a short time in 1732; it was again occupied by Russia in 1796-1812, but finally its greater part, north of the Astara river, became part of the Russian domain (Weidenbaum 1888), and a century later, the Soviet Union. It was in Lenkoran, the only major urban centre within the Talishi-speaking lands, that, during the unruly period of Musavat regime in 1918-20, the Talishis enjoyed certain autonomy in the so-called Russian Talish- Mughan Republic. Once again, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, northern Talish rebelled against the politically troubled Re- public of Azerbaijan, and the short-lived Talish-Mughan Republic, proclaimed in Lenkoran by colonel Ali Akram Hummatov (Russian Gumbatov), was suppressed by Baku in August 1993. After the Russian conquest, Fath 'Ali Shah Qajar divided the main territory of Persian Talish among five local clans, thus came to being the Kkamse-ye Tavdlees,consisting of Karganrud, Asalem, Taleshdula(b), Shanderman, and Masal. To complete the inventory of the Talishi- speaking areas of Iran, as is known today, one may add Khotbesara, Lavandvil, Astara, perhaps 'Anbaran (in the Namin district of Ardabil) to the north, and Masula, with its southern and eastern fringes to the south. Today most of the Talishi-speakers inhabit the sa/restdn of Tal- ish, an administrative division of the province of Gilan. Because of the lack of a consistent census principles both in Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan, any suggestion on the number of the Talishis must inevitably be of speculative character. Nevertheless, due to various factors, the approximate number of the Talishi-speaking population in both parts of Talish may be estimated around two mil- lions one for each part. Given the reliable historical data at our dis- posal, this figure, at least for the northern Talish in Azerbaijan, should not be regarded as an overestimation. Indeed, already in 1894, the Russian census counted 88,449 souls in 161 rural centres inhabited by Talishis (Kavkazskij kalendar' na 1894 god). This last figure must have multiplied exponentially in the past century given the high birth rate among the people. Demographic data about the Talishis of Azerbai- jan, however, have been grossly manipulated for political reasons in favour of the titular population of the republic. According to the suc- cessive censuses conducted in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, the number of Talishis shows a diminishing trend: it starts 77,039 in 1926, and disappears altogether from the census in 1979. Surprisingly, how- ever, in the 1989 Soviet census the Talishis "re-emerge" once more, numbering 21,914 (cf. Borjian 1998). This content downloaded from 128.59.222.12 on Wed, 04 Nov 2015 19:15:29 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 46 GARNIK ASATRIAN, HABIB BORJIAN Talishisand the Ka3ovinoi The search for real or mythical ancestors is a characteristic feature of any ethnic formation in modern times, especially in case of peoples deprived of written tradition, historiography, and other attributes of a nation state. Despite the fact that the Talishis, both in Iran and in the north, have explicit Iranian identity, the situation with the Talishis in Azerbaijan Republic, living as an enclave within the predominantly Turkic environment, has inspired the southern intellectual milieu as well. Having always been faced with the non-loyal treatment on behalf of the titular nation, the northern Talishis have acquired a keen sense of self-identity. The need for their own ancestral background among the Talishis is aggravated by the fact that South Caspian Iranian eth- nic groups-the Gilakis and Mazandaranis already have their estab- lished ancestors among the ancient population of the region; more- over, the ethno-toponymy of the Caspian area is also transparent to certain extent. The local Talishi pundits unanimously point at the Ka6olatot (Ca- dusii) (see Schmitt), one of the ancient autochthonous tribes of the re- gion, as the supposed ancestors of the Talishi people, in so far as the Kadusians are already becoming an element of the Talishi identity. Many items in Gilan in the Talishi-inhabited regions bear the name Kadus (e.g. a luxurious hotel in Rasht's downtown); it has even be- come a popular proper name for boys. Strange as it may seem, this is one of the rare cases when a folk self- identification with an ancient people can be, at least tentatively, sub- stantiated with historical and linguistic backgrounds.